Cayli Beer has never missed the $807 rent payment on her two-bedroom apartment in Gladstone, Mo. Until this month.

The Mexican restaurant where she works in Parkville, north of Kansas City, has cut her hours significantly. The $100 to $120 she collected waiting tables six shifts a week has dwindled to $40 a day for two shifts delivering curbside to-go orders.

Her roommate, also a restaurant server, is completely out of work from the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“Obviously it’s impossible to pay rent when I make $80 a week and she brings home nothing,” said 21-year-old Beer. ”We really have no idea what we’re going to do.”

With stunning swiftness, the coronavirus pandemic has pushed countless workers to the financial brink. In less than a month, the virus has laid waste to a once-booming economy, leaving behind a painful trail of layoffs, furloughs and reduced hours and broken lives.

Now, it’s April 1. And bills are due.

Interviews with Kansas and Missouri workers over the past 48 hours paint a grim picture of tough choices. Some are sorting through which bills to pay now and which ones can be set aside for later. Others wonder how they’ll put food on the table.

“I think it’s going to be devastating, and I really believe that there’s no way for us to fully understand how devastating this will be,” said Tara Raghuveer, founder of KC Tenants, which advocates for tenants’ rights.

Congress passed and President Donald Trump last week signed into law a $2 trillion relief package that will provide a one-time, $1,200 check to American workers making up to $75,000 a year. Families will receive an additional $500 per child.

But the cash won’t land in bank accounts and mail boxes for at least two to three weeks. The challenge will be getting from here to there.

“They just need to bridge from where they are until the next few weeks when checks arrive. For some it will be difficult. For most, it will be very difficult,” said Robert DeYoung, a business economics professor at the University of Kansas.

Chris Belveal, a Newton truck driver who delivers gas and diesel to convenience stores in south-central Kansas, has seen work fall off dramatically over the past two weeks.

“It looks like the credit cards are just going to have to kiss my ass for a little bit,” he said.

Liz Alexander was laid off from her job as a social media strategist a few weeks before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. The Columbia resident doesn’t qualify even for loosened unemployment application requirements because her job loss wasn’t related to the virus.

But the pandemic has made it hard to find new work. Her husband’s income and her severance package cover the April bills and rent, but Alexander doesn’t know what she’ll do after that.

“Getting laid off brought its own set of hard decisions and discussions, and that I was kind of mentally ready to tackle,” she said. “But then a whole bunch of other weird crazy unexpected stuff came up and I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with this all at the same time.

‘Scrape my pennies’

Before the pandemic, Beer and her roommate earned enough to buy groceries, cover the rent and put gas in their cars. But they didn’t have much cushion.

And with below-average wages, researchers say service industry individuals are already some of the most vulnerable in society.

For the week ending March 21, more than 42,000 Missourians and nearly 24,000 Kansans filed initial unemployment claims — a massive surge.

The federal relief package significantly boosts the amount and duration of unemployment benefits. The federal government will extend benefits for 39 weeks, up from the standard 26-week cap.

States will have an additional $600 per week for displaced workers. Kansas unemployment benefits are normally capped at $488 per week. Missouri’s are $320.

Beer said that will help. But state call centers are swamped with the tens of thousands who suddenly find themselves out of work.

“It’s actually almost impossible to get into unemployment right now,” she said. “You can call over and over and over again. You just redial and redial.”

Beer said several residents of her Gladstone apartment complex who also work in restaurants planned to ask management for flexibility in paying rent.

She said she would even offer to give her landlord $80 now — the only income she has — as a show of good faith.

“If there were ever some time for a grace period or anything like that, it would be now,” Beer said. “Rent isn’t something that’s even feasible for us to do right now. We struggle to feed ourselves, yet alone pay rent.”

Beer said she tried calling her leasing office multiple times this week to no avail. The Star’s calls to the complex went unanswered Tuesday.

Ashley Johnson, 35, has only lived in her group home in Kansas City for a couple months. Before she was in a hotel and then City Union Mission, a homeless shelter.

Johnson, a mother of three, normally works three jobs. She has lost work at two — and more than half her income — in the past few weeks because of the virus. She already missed last week’s rent payment of $125, but expects to have $250 to give her landlord this week.

“I’ve been trying to scrape my pennies and wait until I get paid again,” Johnson said.

Making rent, or not

Raghuveer, with KC Tenants, expects thousands across Kansas City will be unable to pay their rent Wednesday.

Already, she said, vast numbers of tenants spend more than 30% of their paycheck on rent. For them, losing even some of their income could be devastating.

“On a normal day, something like a flat tire or a sick kid...could destabilize someone to the brink of not being able to pay their rent and potentially facing an eviction,” Raghuveer said.

A pandemic makes that worse.

Robert Long, president of Kansas City-based Landlords Inc., said at least one of his tenants was laid off because of the virus and won’t be able to make his rent payment Wednesday.

“We’ve asked him to just keep in contact with us as he finds out whether or not he’s eligible for any relief programs and have told him that we’ll just work with him,” Long said.

Long said he won’t be charging his tenants with penalties if they’re late on rent because of the virus. He also works with other landlords, one of whom has offered percentage discounts on their rent.

For now, an eviction moratorium in Jackson County will keep people in their homes. But, to Raghuveer, those policies are “not nearly enough.”

An eviction moratorium prohibits landlords from removing people from their homes if they don’t pay rent. But once it ends, those bills, interest and late fees are due. She worries — as does Long — that tenants bills’ may pile up.

“If someone is able to and not paying their rent along the way, they’re going to have an insurmountable balance at the end of this situation potentially,” Long said.

Raghuveer said it’s “hard to overstate how destabilizing” it will be if tenants emerge from the pandemic only to face eviction.

“That’s kids being moved from their schools; that’s workers being moved farther away from their jobs,” she said. “That’s thousands of people potentially who are on the market looking for apartments with an eviction on their record.”

Raghuveer said KC Tenants wants to see a rent and mortgage suspension, which would eliminate rather than delay, those payments. She argued once the crisis is over, landlords will be “aggressive” in collecting payments.

“Instead of putting the burden of stabilizing landlords on the tenants, we should be putting the burden on the government,” Raghuveer said.

Long was skeptical. He wasn’t sure the state could force mortgage companies to forgive part of a home loan. They could require that lenders allow borrowers to skip payments, but he said the borrower still owes that amount of money and interest at some point over the course of the mortgage.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, has been resistant even to issuing a statewide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.

“Are people getting evicted now, because of the COVID-19? I don’t think any of us want that to happen,” Parson, a Republican, said. “But you got to evaluate every one of those situations differently. And we do that we do that every day.”

Parson said it’s “difficult to make a blanket policy for the entire state of Missouri,” which is similar to the sentiment he has used to push back against calls for a statewide stay-at-home order to limit the spread of the virus.

In Kansas, Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has issued a statewide executive order prohibiting evictions and foreclosures if non-payment is due to the pandemic. The move provides a respite for Kansas residents, such as Cianna Atchison, a Wichita musician.

Atchison already struggles to pay bills, but the landlord of her duplex regularly works with her and accepts late payments. Atchison, an administrative assistant at AccuWeather, has been off work for almost three weeks.

Atchison has used vacation time while she’s been off and borrowed a week of vacation as well.

She’ll receive her final paycheck Friday, and is calculating what to pay when.

“I have bills that are due now, so I’m going to take that check and spread it,” she said. “Most everything is going to be partially paid. I’ve got too many to cover.”

Atchison is looking for a job she can do from home, but she’s not had any luck.

“It’s just kind of chaos,” she said. “For the most part I’m fine, but I will have, like, little breakdowns every once in a while.”

Atchison said she prays daily and often thinks of her late mother.

“I think of her a lot,” she said. “It kind of gives me strength.”

Keeping up with the mortgage

The housing pinch almost sure to result from the coronavirus also extends to homeowners — those who live in their homes and those who rent them out.

Normally, Wichita residents Dana Britton and his wife, Cathy Payne, are both lenient when it comes to late payers.

“Sometimes they struggle, and sometimes they will just pay late or just pay in payments if they fall behind,” Payne said. “It’s not a bad thing to just get money later on in the month as well.”

Except for perhaps now. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, Payne was laid off from her dental hygienist jobs, putting the pair in a financial pinch.

The rental units are a particular stress, too.

Payne called the multiple mortgage companies she used to finance the rental properties. One told her she could extend her loan and pay only interest and escrow for three months. Another said it couldn’t advise her to skip payments but that it wouldn’t charge late fees or hit her credit report for six months.

“I feel a little bit better, but I still feel the pressure,” Payne said. “I have a lot of . . . financial responsibilities that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to meet because of my unemployment and the possible unemployment of my renters.”

At the direction of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week introduced payment deferrals for homeowners. The programs allow borrowers to defer delinquent principal and interest payments until their mortgage maturity date, the pay-off date or when the property is sold.

The two government-sponsored businesses accounted for nearly half of all U.S. mortgages derived in 2018.

Nutter Home Loans, based in Kansas City and rebranded from James B. Nutter, reached out to its customer base Monday to inform them of new guidelines that will allow for leniency on tardy mortgage payments.

Kansas City-based UMB Bank is offering mortgage payment deferment or modifications “on an individual customized basis.”

Commerce Bank, also based in Kansas City, is likewise offering suspension or reduction of mortgage payments to some affected customers. The bank has already seen a slight uptick in inbound calls from borrowers, said Jeff Gerner, president of Commerce Bank Mortgage.

While the effects of the virus continue to ripple across the economy, he said the bank is prepared for impacts to customers of all income backgrounds.

“Customers need to talk to their lenders just as soon as they feel any kind of distress over their situation,” Gerner said. “The sooner you can start the conversation — even if you don’t think you need the help right now — the better prepared you will be for when you do.”

Next month?

As the deadline for his April rent check loomed, Adam Littleton logged into his bank account to check his balance.

The total still outweighed the rent for his one-bedroom apartment in Kansas City. He was fine, for now.

“We’ll see what happens in May,” he said.

No one knows how long the pandemic will last, or whether jobs will be available when it’s all over.

As recently as 14 days ago, Littleton operated in the financial black. He had a steady job as a bartender in Westport. He worked paycheck to paycheck — or tip to tip, as he called it — but there was always the guarantee of another paycheck, always another friendly tipper.

The pandemic has erased that security. Already, Littleton is rationing food and cutting out irresponsible discretionary spending. Odd jobs like yard work helped him stay afloat this month.

But next month? And the month after that?

“I’m not going to be able to come up with a miracle cure to this,” he said. “It’s very concerning as far as what’s going to happen in the next 30, the next 45 days, the next two months.”